Leading legal pricing experts launch AI-powered pricing tool

10 October 2018

Legal pricing experts Burcher Jennings and Validatum have today announced a ‘game changing partnership’ with cutting-edge legal tech firm Neota Logic set to disrupt the world of legal pricing for the benefit of clients and firms. The partnership is behind the imminent launch of Virtual Pricing Director – a new artificial intelligence (AI) powered legal pricing tool designed to make the pricing process quicker and easier for law firms.

With globally renowned legal pricing expert Richard Burcher’s insight built into the software for the benefit of firms of all sizes, Virtual Pricing Director is a ground-breaking software platform that combines world-leading pricing expertise and Neota Logic’s legal-tech innovation experience to deliver the confidence-building openness and transparency needed for 21st century pricing.

The platform will offer intelligent templates that incorporate an array of practice areas, tasks, rates and clauses, and produces an automated pricing dashboard that presents clients and law firms with a clear breakdown of expected spending, offering unprecedented accuracy and transparency in the legal pricing process for clients, while saving time and money for firms. The platform also helps law firms meet compliance requirements under the new transparency regulations coming into effect in December.

Richard Burcher, co-founder of the Virtual Pricing Director said:

“Market pressures and regulatory requirements are fuelling an inevitable drive towards greater price efficiency across the legal sector. Given rising client expectations and the step-changes in the business side of law in recent years, it is extraordinary that the prevalent pricing methodologies continue to range from ‘gut feel’ estimates, to complex, time-consuming yet opaque deconstructions of every element within a legal matter. Virtual Pricing Director enables fee earners at all levels to generate high quality and accurate pricing proposals in a fraction of the time that it currently takes.”

Burcher Jennings CEO Martyn Jennings adds:

“Complex changes to pricing requirements and a growing expectation of ‘more for less’ are putting unprecedented pressure on firms to improve pricing proposals. This game-changing pricing solution, which brings together globally recognised pricing expertise with cutting-edge legal tech providers, will save crucial time for law firms and give clients a much clearer picture of how money will be spent.

“As a cloud-based solution, the Virtual Pricing Director comes with no costly up-front installation fee, making this an exceptionally cost-effective solution for all shapes and sizes of firm. We’re thrilled to be able to introduce this to the market, and make pricing an easier process for all lawyers and firms moving forward.”

Rick Seabrook, from legal technology experts Neota Logic, said:

“At the press of a button, Virtual Pricing Director will give users a complete pricing summary, outlining not only the fees options but also an explanation of how they are calculated, making it easy for the client to select the right option for them. One more click and it will be automatically emailed to the client, and put on your client file. All of this takes you somewhere between 3 to 5 minutes depending upon how complex the matter might be. ”

The software intuitively walks law firms through the whole pricing process and ’sense checks’ any figures that are generated based on previous examples that have been saved in the system.

Once the scope and budget of a project has been established, the software will intelligently and automatically generate the relevant assumptions and exclusions. It will then create a price risk profile diagram, a recommended fee range and a recommended fixed fee based on intelligent assessment of the price risk profile.

Virtual Pricing Director also provides the fee earner (and if relevant, the supervising partner) with automatically generated live updates on how each of the phases is tracking relative to budget.